A team of MBA students from Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management took second place in a prestigious MBA case competition, the University of Texas at Austin National Real Estate Challenge.
Team members were Justin Albright, Tim Kilroy, Peter Kleinberg, Gavin McDowell, Johnny Shoaf and Stephen Songy.
A team from the University of California at Berkeley took first place. According to Songy, the fictional case was inspired by an actual case – a Goldman Sachs real estate fund’s $400 million acquisition and rehabilitation of the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel and Casino.
“We were given three days to work on the case and then submitted our analysis and recommendations,” Songy said. “Then we traveled to Austin to present to a panel of judges comprised of experienced practitioners in the field of real estate, including the key individuals who led the actual deal for Goldman Sachs.”
The Vanderbilt team advanced to the finals (for the second time in two years) and won $3,000 for the second place finish.
“Given the field of competition, we can be very proud of our students,” said Jacob Sagi, associate professor of finance.
In addition to UC-Berkeley and Vanderbilt, teams came from business schools at the following universities: the University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Virginia, Duke, Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Stanford, UT-Austin, UCLA, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Southern California, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin and Yale.
The Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management is ranked as a top institution by Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Financial Times and Forbes. For more information about Owen, visit www.owen.vanderbilt.edu.
Media contact: Jennifer Johnston (615) 322-NEWS
Jennifer.johnston@vanderbilt.edu